In Memoriam

TERRIS MOORE 1908-1993

Terris Moore, age 85, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, explorer, mountaineer, light-plane pilot and President Emeritus of the University of Alaska, died on November 7 after a massive heart attack. He became internationally known in 1932 when he and three companions reached and surveyed Minya Konka (now called Gongga Shan) in Sichuan, China. Moore and Richard Burdsall, both AAC members, ascended this very difficult mountain (that Burdsall and Arthur Emmons surveyed as 24,490 feet high), and in doing so climbed several thousand feet higher than Americans had gone before. At the time, Moore was the outstanding American climber.

Moore, Terry to his friends, was born in Haddonfield, New Jersey, on April 11, 1908 and attended schools in Haddonfield, Philadelphia and New York before entering and graduating from Williams College, where he captained the cross-country team and became an avid skier. After graduating from college, he attended the Harvard School of Business Administration, from which he received two degrees: Master of Business Administration and Doctor of Commercial Science.

Terry’s mountain climbing had begun long before this time. In 1927, he climbed Chimborazo (20,702 feet) in Ecuador and made the first ascent of 17,159-foot Sangai, an active volcano there. Three years later, he joined the Harvard Mountaineering Club and also became a member of the American Alpine Club, connections which led that year to his making the first ascent of 16,400-foot Mount Bona in Alaska with Allen Carp& and the first unguided ascent of Mount Robson in the Canadian Rockies. These climbs led to his first ascent of 15,282-foot Fairweather in coastal Alaska, also with Carp&, and to his decision the following year to join an Explorers Club expedition to Minya Konka, as already mentioned.

In 1933, Terry married Katrina Eaton Hincks and for two years taught at the University of California at Los Angeles before settling in Boston. There he had successes as an author of popular textbooks on taxes and as a financial consultant before World War II began. He had also become an experienced light-plane pilot and had flown hundreds of hours, but when he tried to enlist as a pilot in the Army Air Force, he was turned down because of a slight heart murmur. Instead, he accepted an invitation to go to Washington as a consultant on clothing and equipment for troops experiencing arctic, winter or mountain conditions. In that capacity, he tested items in various places and made the third ascent of McKinley as a member of the Alaskan Test Expedition in 1942.

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IN MEMORIAM 319

After the war, Moore became president of the New England Society of Natural History and helped with its metamorphosis into the far more active Boston Museum of Science. In 1949, he was asked to become the second president of the University of Alaska. For three years, he did a great deal to make it a modern university, and in his spare time he continued to establish world records for high-altitude airplane landings. He also helped establish the High Altitude Observatory on Mount Wrangell. Terry was also much involved in flying rescue missions, as I found when he gave up a trip East to search for a plane missing on a flight from the Seward Glacier to Yakutat with Foresta and Valerie Wood and Maurie King on board.

In the ensuing years, Terry served as a member to the U.S. Army Scientific Advisory Panel, and he and Katrina made frequent flights throughout northern and arctic Alaska and Canada. They even helped with scientific work on the northern tip of Greenland.

During his lifetime Terry Moore received many honors from the U.S. government, the Boston Museum of Science, the University of Alaska, the American Alpine Club, the Harvard Travellers Club, the Appalachian Mountain Club and so on. He is survived by his wife Katrina, companion for over 50 years, his daughter, three grandchildren, one great-grandchild and a sister.

ROBERT H. BATES

WALTER ABBOTT WOOD 1908-1993

Walter Abbott Wood was born in Hoosick Falls, New York in 1908. He was educated at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire and then for four years in Zurich, Switzerland, where he studied surveying and began his climbing career in the Alps. He had done some surveying in Kashmir and had climbed Ararat and some Mexican volcanoes before becoming a member of the American Alpine Club in 1932. The next year, he climbed with Noel Ode11 in Greenland. From 1935 to 1937 and again from 194 1 to 1946 and from 1950 to 1955 he was a member of the American Alpine Club Council. He served as vice president from 1938 to 1941 and president from 1947 to 1949.

Although he also led expeditions to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia and to the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, the region of his special interest was the southwest comer of Canada’s Yukon Territory. The St. Elias Mountains (the Icefield Ranges) were the focus of his mountaineering and scientific interests for the rest of his life. His first ascents included Steele (16,644 feet) in 1935, Wood (15,885 feet) and Walsh (14,787 feet) in 1941, Hubbard (15,015 feet) and Alverstone (14,565 feet) in 195 1. He was also the leader of the expedition that in 1949 made the first ascent of Vancouver ( 15,860 feet).

For more than twenty years, Wood led expeditions doing glaciological and survey work in the St. Elias Mountains, much of it requiring mountaineering or

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glacial expertise. With the American Geographical Society and the Arctic Institute of North America, in both of which he served as an officer, he helped to found a station for high-altitude research on Mount Logan. He also established and helped support a research center for scientific studies of the St. Elias Mountains at Burwash Landing on Kluane Lake. He was still visiting the center and checking glacial movement when he was over 80.

In December, 1940, the American Alpine Club established a Defense Committee with Walter as chairman. The following summer, he led an expedition to the St. Elias Mountains that, among other activities, tested mountain clothing and equipment for the U.S. Army. In 1942, he was commissioned in the U.S. Army Specialist Corps. That year, he had already been a member of the Alaskan Test Expedition, which made the third ascent of McKinley while testing proposed Army items of mountain and cold-weather equipment. He was in charge of air dropping for the expedition and stationed in Anchorage, though he would have much preferred being on the mountain itself. Eventually, he served as military attache in the American Embassy in Ottawa, Canada, where he had much to do with the organization of Operation Muskox, a winter test of American and Canadian over-snow equipment. Shortly afterward, he retired from the Army with the rank of colonel.

In 1951, Walter suffered a great tragedy when his first wife (the former Foresta Hodgson) and his only daughter Valerie died on a flight from the Seward Glacier to Yakutat, Alaska. Despite intensive searches, the place where the plane crashed has never been discovered. On the same expedition, as four of us were hurrying to learn if the plane had come to our Base Camp, I fell into a large crevasse, from which Walter and his son extricated me. Naturally for this 1 have always been thankful.

Between 1934 and 1975, Walter wrote many articles, notes and book reviews for the American Alpine Journal. He was also well-known in geographical circles. To my knowledge, nobody else has ever been president of the Explorer’s Club, the American Geographical Society and the American Alpine Club.

After Foresta’s death and three unsuccessful marriages, he married Renee Menassa, who was his devoted wife for 17 years. After a long illness, Walter died on May 13, 1993, leaving RenCe, his son Peter, six grandchildren, three great-grandchildren and two stepdaughters. He was buried with military honors in Hoosick Falls. A memorial service was held later in New York City.

Walter’s formal manner sometimes deceived people. He had a good sense of humor and could be very outgoing. He was a man of great modesty and integrity.

ROBERT H. BATES

IN h4EMORIAM 321

JOHN SALATHE 1899-1993

Here are a few facts to piece out the excellent obituary below. John SalathC was born in Niederschontal. near Basel, Switzerland on June 14, 1899. He studied blacksmithing in his home town for three years. He then went to Paris, but he had such a bad experience with bedbugs that he left at two A.M. for Le Havre, where he found work on a coastal steamer as a fireman. Later, he shipped on a bigger ship as an oiler and occasional deckhand. He was at sea for four years, going as far as Africa and Brazil. He finally arrived in Montreal where he met his wife-to-be. They were married in 1929 and emigrated to San Mateo, California, where he founded his famous Peninsula Wrought Iron Works.

ALLEN STECK

The magnificent first ascents that made John Salatht a legend moved rock climbing to a new level. To the current generation of climbers he is a god-like figure. Rather than spend time on his major accomplishments, I will take you back to the day of his first climb. It was a month or so after the end of World War II and Fritz Lippmann and I had abandoned the cockpits of B-17s and P-3% to return to rock climbing. We were planning an ascent of the Eagle’s Nest on Hunter’s Hill, a local piton climb in the San Francisco Bay Area during an outing of the Sierra Club’s now extinct Rock Climbing Section. John appeared at a local climb for the first time on that day. We tied him into our rope as middleman because the section expected the more experienced to help the newcomers. He was a contrast to the two of us. At 47, he was old enough to have been our father.

The most difficult pitch of the Eagle’s Nest is a traverse secured by pitons 100 feet above the base of the rock. The exposure is made more spectacular because the ground below the base slopes downward for a half mile or so. I led the pitch and John was out of sight to both of us. After securing my belay position, I called for John to climb and emphasized that he should “climb freely.” This was our way of saying that neither the rope nor the pitons should be used for assistance. I felt no activity on the rope for two or three minutes and suddenly John appeared around the corner unroped! He thought I had meant to climb free of the rope. Height had no meaning to John and to him fear was a stranger.

Let me now move to Yosemite a few month later when he and Phil Bettler were attempting a climb of Washington Column Direct during one of the Rock Climbing Section’s trips to the Valley. To set the stage, you must understand that Phil was severely hard of hearing. It was approaching dusk. All the rest of us had completed our climbs, but Phil and John had not returned. A group journeyed to a site that allowed us to survey Washington Column. When we spotted them, the sight was terrifying. They were off route and directly over the overhang at the nose of the Column that drops 1000 feet into the valley floor. They were coming down. John was rappelling and was just short of the

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overhang, belayed by Phil. At that point he must have realized what lay below. Remember that Phil was hard of hearing and so John could not communicate with him. Dusk turned into darkness. John and Phil appeared at Camp Four late that night and filled us in on the details. John had tied himself into the rappel and cut off just enough to make two slings. The slings were then tied to the rappel in Prusik knots and he worked his way to Phil’s position. Anyone who has used Prusik slings on a rappel that was not secured at the bottom will realize how difficult it is to raise the lower sling. To fearlessness, I add unbelievable strength and resolve.

Since John was an ornamental blacksmith by trade, we would design special pitons, provide the designs to him and the new pitons would appear at the next climb and be given to us. He would not take a penny for the material. As he gained more climbing experience, he designed and forged his own. Next to Chuck Wilts, he was responsible for the greatest piton innovations of those times. To fearlessness, strength and resolve, I add generosity.

John SalathC first became a member of the American Alpine Club in 1950. He was elected to Honorary Membership in 1976.

In his post-climbing years, he divided his time between the east side of the Sierra in the summer and areas near the Salton Sea in the winter. He was in a nursing home during the last few years of his life where he assisted fellow residents and tended to the gardens when he was over ninety.

ROBIN HANSEN

RICHARD MANNING LEONARD 1908-1993

Richard Manning Leonard, a member of the American Alpine Club since 1936, was elected to Honorary Membership in 1981. He was born in Elyria, Ohio. He was a former president of both the Sierra Club and the Save-the- Redwoods League. He was active in the Wilderness Society, the Conservation Law Society of America, the Trustees for Conservation, the Varian Foundation and the Forest Genetics Research Foundation.

After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of California’s School of Law, he was admitted to the State Bar of California in 1933. After serving as chief attorney for the Regional Agricultural Credit Corporation, he entered private practice in San Francisco in 1938. He retired in the early 1980s. During World War II, he was an officer in the Office of the Quartermaster General in Washington on the development of Army clothing and equipment and then served in the Asian theater.

Dick is survived by his wife Doris, whom he married in 1934, two daughters and two grandchildren.

Aside from his life-long work for conservation, Dick was an early pioneer in Western mountaineering. His Belaying the Leader, written in 1946, became the bible of rock climbers during the rapid development of the sport.

IN MEMORIAM

I first got to know Dick in the early 1930s when a small group of Sierra Club members began to practice climbing in the Berkeley hills area of Cragmont Rock. These rocks, never more than 25 to 40 feet above the base, had vertical faces which offered us real challenges. Dick, Bestor Robinson and I formed a team and went on to the Yosemite. The Cathedral Spires were still unclimbed and the walls were spectacular to neophytes like us. Dick and I led the high- angle climbing; Bestor, married and with two children in the nest, was our belayer par excellence. The result was a strong rope team of three. Dick and I had difficulty in finding what we could not climb, despite below-the-ankle tennis shoes. We never top-roped. We managed a large number of first ascents, including Leonard’s Minaret in 1932 and the Cathedral Spires in 1934.

The quality I particularly valued about Dick was his great joy in the art of climbing-so great was his exuberance that it simply oozed out of every pore of his body, creating a positive effect on the whole team. He was a most wonderful friend and partner the entire time I knew him. Such repeated experiences enjoyed then and relived many times both in private recall and in my fireside circle with my own children, with wilderness students and with mountain friends over the ensuing fifty years are the core of memory of my climbing partner.

JULES M. EICHORN

CARL A. BLAUROCK 1894-l 993

I first met my long-time friend and climbing companion, Carl Blaurock, in 1920 on a scheduled trip of the Colorado Mountain Club to the Crestone Needle in the Sangre de Ctisto Range. The mountain, according to local knowledge, had not yet been climbed. Only four of us made it to the summit and we could find no indication of previous occupation-though we were later informed that others had been there but were driven off by static electricity without leaving a trace.

In 1925 I was with Carl on the Colorado Mountain Club’s annual outing that same year for several climbs of the 14,OOOers. On this outing, he met his future wife, Louise Forsyth, to whom he was happily married for 65 years. She preceded him in death by a year, both of them almost 100 years old.

Carl was the last of the founding members of the Colorado Mountain Club. He and Bill Ervin were the first to climb all the more than fifty peaks in Colorado over 14,000 feet. I accompanied them on most of these ascents. They also climbed in Wyoming, California, on the Mexican volcanoes and in the Alps. He was well known for his excellent climbs on the east face of Longs Peak, which he declared to be his favorite. He ascended the east face 18 times.

He joined his father in the metalurgical business, having graduated from the Colorado School of Mines with an engineering degree in 1916.

In World War I, Carl was a balloon observer in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. In 1932, he acquired a Gypsy Moth biplane, which he piloted for many years.

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He was also an avid skier. Slowing down some, he continued actively in photography. He formed the William Henry Jackson Camera Club, which had the Mount of the Holy Cross as its symbol. In fact, his last climb in 1973, at the age of 79, was up Notch Mountain on a centennial trip of William Henry Jackson’s trip to photograph the Mount of the Holy Cross. He placed a commemorative plaque at the spot where Jackson had placed his camera 100 years before. He also took pleasure and gave pleasure with his piano playing.

He had a host of friends, many of whom attended his funeral at St. John’s Cathedral, where, he used to say, he attended church “regularly, every Easter.”

DUDLEY T. SMITH

STEPHEN H. HART 1908-1993

Stephen Harding Hart, who made several first Colorado ascents-Lone Eagle and Crestone Needle-in his teens and climbed many 14,OOOers later with his teen-aged sons, died on November 7 in his sleep.

Hart is known as one of two founding partners of one of Colorado’s largest and most influential law firms with offices in Denver and Aspen, Boise, ID, Billings MT, Cheyenne WY and Washington DC. At the law firm, Steve’s office faced west toward his beloved mountains. He encouraged the mountaineering efforts of his staff.

His interest in mountaineering, law and history resulted naturally from his family connections. His father, Richard Hart, encouraged Steve and his older brother, Jerry (John L. Jerome Hart) to go on trips with Albert Ellingwood, Bill Ervin, Dudley Smith and Carl Blaurock. Dudley Smith, now 90, recalls that when he was 20, he, Jerry Hart and Carl Blaurock planned to claim a first ascent of the Crestone Needle. Blaurock scheduled the trip for mid September, when most of the season’s snow was melted. Ellingwood, Steve, then 16, and Eleanor Davis had, however, already reached the needle’s summit from the San Luis side on what is now known as Ellingwood’s At&e. Dudley also remembers climbing later with Steve in the Alps, particularly the GrCpon.

Even earlier, when Steve was 13, he made the first ascent of the Bishop near his maternal grandparents’ summer home on Buffalo Creek with Ellingwood and Agnes Vaille. Again with Ellingwood, he made the second-known ascent of Mount Moran in the Tetons. On several climbs with Ellingwood, Steve carried a transit to measure elevations. When Steve was 17, he participated in the first ascent of Lone Eagle. Blaurock, Bill Ervin and Elwyn Erps were on the climb.

Steve’s son Richard recalls that Ellingwood, Jerry and Steve Hart were all involved later in naming Mount Oxford after the British university they all had attended. Richard, who is now a state judge in Vail, said his father climbed the last of his forty-five 14,OOOers on August 12, 1972. He climbed many of them with his brother Jerry, Ellingwood, Blaurock, Dudley Smith and Henry Buchtel. He became a member of the American Alpine Club in 1927.

IN MEMORIAM 325

Steve Hart’s connections with Colorado history were inspired by his father, who taught law at the University of Denver, and by James Grafton Rogers, President of the American Alpine Club from 1938 to 1940 and a founder and first president of the Colorado Mountain Club. Rogers later became Steve’s father-in-law. Steve subsequently served the Colorado Historical Society for 50 years as president, chairman and chairman emeritus.

He is survived by two sons, Richard and James Grafton Rogers Hart, a teacher in Colorado Springs, and a daughter Georgina Hart Martin-Smith, a psychologist in Nederland, Colorado. A granddaughter is married to world-class climber and AAC member, Adrian Burgess.

SALLY Ross

STANLEY S. SHEPARD 1938-1993

Stan Shepard died on August 12 in the Quimsa Cruz mountains of Bolivia when the vehicle in which he was riding slid off a mountain road in a snowstorm and tumbled 120 meters. Stan died at the scene. He was attempting to reach a base camp where he expected to help friends who were caught high on Gigante Grande by the storm.

Stan was an active climber until the day he died. He climbed Illimani, Bolivia’s plum in July of 1993. He retired from the U.S, Foreign Service in 1990 after 26 years that included tours of duty in Bolivia, Chile, Yugoslavia, Spain, NATO Brussels, Washington, D.C. and others. He received the Department of Defense medal for Distinguished Civilian Service among other awards and presidential citations.

Stan lived with his family in Bolivia, where he regularly logged first ascents, including rock peak climbs in the Cordillera Quimsa Cruz and mountaineering ascents throughout the country. He was developing top-of-the- line ski and mountaineering clothing called Los Andes, which was to have its grand opening at SIA Las Vegas show in the spring of 1994.

Stan learned to ski when he was five years old and climbed his first mountain at age 13. In the late 1950s. he began climbing in Boulder, Colorado and is credited with the first ascents of the Bastille Crack (1959), the Great Zot (1960) and Swanson’s A&e (1960). He broke his neck in 1962 while attempting the first ascent of Anaconda, which eventually went A4, on the Twin Owls on Lumpy Ridge. He also did an early ascent of Mount Rainier’s Liberty Ridge. Moreover, he logged hundreds of first ascents in the mountains of North and South America, the Alps and the Balkans.

Stan was happy climbing anything, anywhere, but mountaineering and technical skiing were his obsessions. His approach to climbing is captured by some of the following excerpts from a biographical article appearing in The Climbing Art: “I’m a mountaineer, a pretty good generalist, reasonably safe, capable of starting a primus stove at two A.M. I hate to fall off anything, even

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on the little rocks . . . I really enjoy third- to middle-fifth-class climbing, lots of it, on a mountain. Ice is neat. Big frozen snow slopes are great. Ski mountaineering is fantastic . . . It’s such a big bag of toys that you would be a fool to overspecialize unless you have an exteme talent, which fortunately I lack . . The generalist mountaineer is an omnivorous sort who stares at sunsets a lot.”

Stan’s humor, spirit and light-hearted intensity will be missed by the people who knew and climbed with him during the past decades. Although we tend to think of climbers reaching their prime at a younger age, this was not the case for Stan. He remained active throughout the years and viewed his retirement not as a time to relax but as a time to embark on new adventures. His full and active life and his untimely death stand as an example and leave a message for all of us.

Stan had two children who live with his wife in La Paz: Jenifer, 20, and Stephen, 14. His wife Victoria is currently the Bolivian Foreign Minister of Immigration.

SCOTT TITTERINGTON

GUSTAV0 BRILLEMBOURG 1957-1993

Gustav0 Brillembourg was climbing the Northeast Buttress of Higher Cathedral Rock in the Yosemite on September 28. Having climbed the major difficulties of the route, Gustav0 was leading the next to the last pitch when, out of sight of his partner, he fell, pulling out his protection, to a point just below his belayer. Still conscious, Gustav0 and his friend struggled to a ledge, where two hours later he died.

Gustav0 was born in Caracas, Venezuela. He attended Milton Academy, where I first knew him as a wonderfully bright, enthusiastic early teen-ager, interested in everything. He took to rock-climbing and was naturally talented from the beginning on rock and later on ice. He was a skilled wrestler, winning the Massachusetts state wrestling championship. He was a gifted student; I remember teaching him in an advanced Spanish literature class in which he often pointed out to me many of the finer points that I might well have missed. He was already writing and even publishing poetry at that time. He had a deep interest in people. Being a member of a prominent Venezuelan family, he knew that it would be difficult for him in Venezuela to get to know at first hand how the less fortunate Latin Americans lived. At the end of his last year of school, he spent two months with a Peruvian family in the Cordillera Blanca, sleeping as they slept, eating their food, working in the fields by day and becoming a member of the family. He later returned to Peru as leader of an expedition to Chinchey.

Gustav0 graduated cum laude from Harvard College in 1979 and from Georgetown University Law School in 1984, where he was an editor of the Law

IN MEMORIAM 327

Review. He was a highly respected tax lawyer in the New York firm of Davis, Polk and Wardwell. Colleagues admired the intensity and skill with which he attacked his professional work and that was also evident by his enthusiasm for his intellectual pursuits and his love of mountaineering and the outdoors.

He is survived by his wife Fredrika Rhodie Brillembourg, a mezzo-soprano of note, whom he married in 1986, a two-year-old son Gustav0 Jose, his parents Alfred0 and Clara Brillembourg of Caracas, a sister and three brothers.

I could go on deploring the demise of this renaissance man, but it is better to close with a poem that he wrote after the death of one of his mountaineering friends, which could actually indeed be his own obituary.

The Fall I sat watching. And the sun bore down on us with fingers that reached and kneaded. The snow lay flat: a grain that stretched hesitant, immaculate, that burned my eyes.

Below was the slope that lay waiting, as if sheer, unduly treacherous it wound down among snow towers and gaping holes. We were fleeing. As if horrified. As if tired. I was second to last.

The others had gone. The wind settled spindrift that spun around us in furious motion. Motion that churned in unison with the beating of the sun, the shrill air that wrapped around us, the drops of sweat that passed my nose.

He and I talked, we talked in breaks and jerks like men on construction. Lulls that hovered silent, withstanding the heat. We talked of flat places, his eyes remained shrouded behind his goggles. I moved

when it was mine to move, down the slope, a vertical rhythm, the movement of survival. The movement that drew me home, the movement of security the drawing of flesh.

He watched me from above, happy with his thoughts. I felt he loved I felt he knew a joy, behind those goggles. I felt he didn’t need this motion, escape that touched only lonely hearts, and

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I knew the mountain was his. His sitting seemed to weigh him down, a part of this place like a rock, integral; and as I watched, I felt he would never leave the calling of the winds,

the brilliance of the day, the falling of endless dusks like rubies, his wealth, the mother mountain. I moved behind one tower, then another. And if rapidity were to blame I wanted the flat.

The final comer came as I looked beyond the cornices, the ridge we had climbed. I could see where we had once stood, and it seemed I knew the mountain as a whole. I descended onto the flat of the glacier.

Far above moved a dot. It seemed to huddle, in a blur shining like a satellite, or machine as it started down the icefall-a distant thing tied to ropes that angled through towers that murmured,

that sung. I wanted to see his eyes searching in the fault. I could feel his calm as he dropped silent in his vertical world, enveloped in thought, surrounded

by snow. Once he looked up and paused. Twice he went out of sight, the shoulder of the mountain looming above, and pressing its spiral weight down, down he moved and the buzzing in our ears

grew louder. I was looking away when he was close enough to shout. I was looking down when the anchor ripped under his weight. I was looking down when he fell in his serenity.

Static towers were jostled; in one crumbling motion the slope fell like a standing maze of dominoes, that pressed as the rope jerked my searching eyes to the slope, and my ears to the rumbling above,

IN MEMORIAM 329

and my legs stood fixed as I yelled. And I knew I wanted those eyes to come down laughing the half moon brilliance of his ease behind those goggles. I imagined horror, a turning, a spinning with hands

clawing for stability as the world moved- a pounding in his chest as he fought, as I screamed, I screamed and he came down a mass of ice and white and the snow hovered over the area like a cloud

The place was still. I searched for those eyes, that brilliance. I tore at the snow, the blocks, the jumble. I listened for a voice. I sat desperate in the snow.

And the mountain was his. And an ocean had sprung up between us, and I wanted to hold him, to talk of movements, of flat places as only a few hours ago. And I cried.

Gustav0 Brillembourg

H. ADAMS CARTER

STEVEN CRAIG RISSE 1952-1993

Seattle-area climber, Steven Craig Risse, with Mark Bebie and Thomas Waarsdorp, died in late March in an attempt to climb Slipstream, an ice route near the Columbia Icefields. The exact cause of their death is unknown.

Steve was married to Donna McBain, a well-known climber and board member of Women Climbers Northwest. In many ways, theirs was a climber’s dream; it seemed they were always on the go, or getting ready in their basement full of gear. Steve was Chief of Psychiatry at American Lake Veterans Administration Medical Center in Tacoma, where he was a loved and respected clinician and a skilled administrator. He also held a post as Associate Professor of Pyschiatry at the University of Washington, where he conducted vital research on Alzheimer’s disease. Steve rarely shared his accomplishments in one field with practitioners of another, so climbing partners had no idea that Steve saved lives as a clinical psychiatrist, and co-workers had little concept of the extent of his climbing. The exception to this characteristic modesty was Steve’s pride in their home. Visitors were often treated to a grand tour of Steve

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and Donna’s latest improvements to the house: cabinets built, new stereo, Herculean landscaping tasks.

Steve perpetuated the best American amateur tradition. He was deeply committed to his profession, and at the same time he helped define the cutting edge of alpine climbing in the Northwest. Equally at home on rock and ice, Steve constantly improved his skills, flashing 5.12s at the age of 40. This was all carried out without diets and fancy exercise equipment. Noted for their reluctance to get out of bed in the morning, Steve and Donna also loved alpine climbing and disdained unplanned bivouacs. As a result, they developed lightning speed during countless mountain trips. Somehow they found time to remodel a beautiful house, sail, ski and visit their families, demonstrating that climbing can be integrated with professional careers. Steve was rarely satisfied with his accomplishments, yet despite internal and external pressures, he was calm and unruffled, never imposing his concerns on others.

Steve started climbing in 1975 while a medical student at the University of Wisconsin. With longtime partner Ron Lenz and the Wisconsin Hoofers, Steve initiated a tradition of climbing every Sunday, regardless of the weather. As a result, Steve and Ron climbed at Devil’s Lake at -13°F. Steve was rarely content with repeating classics. He established an impressive series of new routes and first free ascents in the Northwest, including the southwest face of Spickard, the north couloir on Redoubt, the south Tahoma Headwall on Rainier, the east face of Cutthroat, the Boving Arete on Dragontail, the southwest face of Waddington, the south Norwegian buttress of Index, the southeast comer of Liberty Bell, the west face of North Early Winter Spire, the north ridge of Chimney Rock, the east face of Lexington Tower and the Independence route on Liberty Bell.

Outside the Pacific Northwest, Risse participated in a bitterly cold winter attempt on Ama Dablam in 1982, the successful 1986 Australian-American expedition on the northwest ridge of Gasherbrum IV, an ascent of Dharamsura in India with Donna in 1988 and a Russian-American expedition to Kirghizia where he and Donna made the first ascent of Little Asan via the western dihedral in 1990.

Climbing in an unconventional threesome, Risse, Bebie and Tuthill made a fast one-day ascent of Polar Circus in the Canadian Rockies in March, 1989. This past winter, Risse and Waarsdorp had just completed Takakkaw Falls and were winding up a successful ice-climbing tour when they set out to climb Slipstream on March 20.

We shall miss Steve as a good friend and an inspirational role model. We can only try to uphold his tradition.

PETER KELFMAN AND RACHEL Cox

IN MEMORIAM 331

LAWRENCE E. NIELSEN 1917-1992

Lawrence E. Nielsen was born and raised on a cattle and wheat ranch near Pilot Rock Oregon. He was educated at Pacific University, Washington State University and Cornell University, from which he received a Ph.D. in chemistry and physics. Larry spent over 32 years as a scientist with the Monsanto Company, doing research on plastic and composite materials. His research resulted in about 150 publications, six patents and five technical books. He received two national awards for this research and a listing in Who’s Who in America. Larry was also an Affiliate Professor of Chemical Engineering for eleven years at Washington University in St. Louis.

Larry was a member of over eighteen climbing and glacier-research expeditions to Alaska and the Yukon, several of which were sponsored by the American Geographical Society and the Arctic Institute of North America. In 1959, he led the first expedition to retrace the Gold-Rush route of 1898 over the Valez Glacier. An amazing number of artifacts were found melting out of the glacier ice.

Larry retired to Redmond, Oregon in 1977 and began tracing the pioneer roads of Oregon, often assisted by his wife Deanne and other members of his family. This research resulted in four books: Pioneer Rouds in Central Oregon, In the Ruts of the Wagon Wheels, Roads of Yesterday, and Oregon’s Fading Past. the latter published posthumously.

He is survived by his wife Deanne, a daughter Linda and two grandchildren.

JAMES RAMSEY

ANDREW W. KRAMER 1894-1993

Andrew W. Kramer died at the age of 99. He lived at Lake Buff, Illinois. He had been a member of the American Alpine Club since 1945. He was known for his articles on nuclear science and engineering. Mr. Kramer was also an accomplished painter in watercolor and oil. He had traveled and climbed in over 200 countries.

ROBERT J. JOHNSON 1931-1993

Bob Johnson has gone from us, a victim of a rare and tragic accident in the Red Rock canyons of Nevada.

He shared with us a unique community of Boston mountaineers bonded in a love of adventure and self-awareness known to but few of the fortunate of this world. Some perceive our passion as fraught with uncommon danger but I assure you that the risks faced in leading a vibrant life loom anywhere as large

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as those encountered in the lead of a difficult pitch. Bob stood out among us for his respect for safety and good method. He advanced in skill through practice and diligence-always aware of ability in relation to potential adversity. He taught these things. He lived these things. So let Bob remind us that no soul, at whatever pinnacle of skill or prudence, can expect always to elude misfortune.

Bob forms part of my earliest memories of the New England mountain- eering scene which I entered after leaving New York. I met Bob in 1968 when he had already climbed for several years and in the days when we explored out-of-the-way crags. He led me up my first ice climb in Mount Washington’s Huntington Ravine. We often went to Tumbledown Mountain, Joe English Hill, Katahdin and Chapel Pond. And, not all of us make it a point actively to lead up to the age of sixty-two!

I don’t know how very many of us Bob influenced. He taught and encouraged more new climbers than anyone else around. He took on those who did not stand out as comers. He looked through the first rank to those in the rear who needed encouragement. Bob’s apprentices always got full measure. On training weekends, having arrived after midnight on a Friday, Bob and his second invariably stepped off for the cliffs first in the morning and, whenever it rained, they had no followers.

Because of our respect for Bob, in 1972 we made him our Appalachian Mountain Club Mountaineering Committee Chairman. His vast mountaineering library gave him a ready knowledge of the history and geography of the world’s ranges and their climbers. Always keen to find new climbing areas, he came to know more about our local rocks than most and had begun work on a local guide. An outcrop he discovered in the Lynn Woods already goes by the name of Johnson’s Crag.

We shall always remember Bob Johnson and talk of him in the high, wild, steep, improbable places of tomorrow.

WILLIAM C. ATKINSON

MARK BEBIE 1952-1993

Mark Bebie and his friends, Steve Risse and Tom Waasdorp, died on March 20, 1993, while attempting Slipstream on Snow Dome in the Canadian Rockies.

Mark was a Washington native. He grew up hiking, skiing and climbing in the Cascade Mountains. Mark graduated from Lakeville High School and Syracuse University. After college, his work included a stint with the airplane manufacturing giant, Boeing. In 1983, he joined a small, but rapidly growing, computer software company, Microsoft, as a programmer. In 1988, Mark quit his job and embarked on a climbing odyssey which included a series of high-standard ascents around the world.

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During two seasons in the French Alps, his climbs included the Central Pillar of Freney, the Voie Jackson on the north face of Les Droites and the Cecchine-Nomine route on the Grand Pilier d’Angle. In the Alaska Range, he teamed up with Jim Nelson and completed the second ascent of the Infinite Spur on Mount Foraker, ten years after the first ascent. In southeast Alaska, he made the first ascent of the south ridge of Mount Augusta and the south buttress of the Devils Thumb. He traveled to the Tien Shan in Asia and climbed Khan Tengri. In the summer of 1992, Mark was part of a strong team in the Karakoram that just missed summiting on Shipton Spire after climbing a big- wall route.

During his years at Microdot, Mark’s weekend climbing trips were legendary. His well-worn Datsun (and later Subaru) with the famous Piolet license plate would be heading towards the mountains or crags well before five PM. on Fridays. With only two days to quench his thirst for climbing each week, he pushed beyond what most people thought possible. One late summer weekend, he hiked into the southern Picket Range of the Cascades, traversed Mounts Terror and Degenhardt and was back at work on Monday morning, a trip that would take most climbers four or five days to complete. Mark’s most significant climbs in the Cascades were the first winter ascents of Bonanza Peak and Mount Triumph and a new winter route on the west face of the north peak of Mount Index.

Mark lived simply. There was no fuss or fashion about his clothes. his hair or anything else. His infinite curiosity coupled with an amazing ability to focus and concentrate meant that nothing was ever without interest for him. After a long climbing trip, Mark might call you and talk for hours, not only about the climb, but also about the books he had read while in camp, the people he met, the wildlife he encountered, the municipal politics of Yakutat, clear-cutting on the Inland Passage, French wines, international issues, computers and anything else that was on his mind at the moment. He was never bored. On an ice-climbing trip to Colorado, he and his partner turned an otherwise average trip into a tour of brew pubs, looking for the best stout, which they found in Telluride. Mark enlivened a day of lift skiing by getting enough runs to bring the lift-ticket price down to less than a dollar per lift ride.

Whether climbing, skiing or hiking, Mark loved to be out in the open air, breathing, living. Indoors or out, he expressed his zest. Around camp, you would find him reading, melting snow, brewing tea, sharpening tools or listening to news or a cultural broadcast on a short-wave radio. In town, Mark was always “being productive,” as he would say, researching a new climb, reading about an old one, sorting slides, brewing beer, studying oriental rugs, working out, anything to keep moving, to feel alive. There were times when his intensity and constant motion would drive you crazy. But he always took the time to bring you back with a kind word or a warm gesture.

For all his climbing accomplishments, one thing we shall remember most was Mark’s incredible greeting whenever and wherever we encountered him, a smile underlined by a grizzled chin, an unblinking stare magnified by glasses

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and then a massive handshake. His hands were perhaps the most animated and expressive parts of him. At times it seemed that without hands Mark couldn’t really express himself.

Mark is survived by his parents Hans and Austie Bebie, his sister Wendy Gordon and her family, his sweetheart Charlotte Fox and his many friends. We all miss him.

WILLIAM PILLING and JIM BOURGEOIS